...and no promises that it won't be a long time until the next update. I'm posting this to Dreamwidth and mirroring to LJ, which--alas--has mostly dried up and blown away. Time was when I could hardly keep up with my LJ friends' postings. Now I'm lucky if there are half a dozen to see on any given day.

And now, the news.

We've moved. As anyone who follows my wife's journal knows, we've moved. We moved from a 3-bedroom apartment in another county to a 2-bedroom apartment in the city again. (We sold our house in 2010 and moved out of the city.) We traded space (a third bedroom) for a much shorter commute. Fifteen to 20 minutes instead of 40 minutes to an hour. It's amazing how much time that seems to save us; far more than a mere 20 minutes would suggest.

The old apartment was very nice, but the living area was rather dark. It faced north, and looked at the side of another building in the complex. The master bedroom had a glorious view across the valley and lots of light--almost too much light for a bedroom--but overall the apartment seemed darker than we'd like. Still, it was overall a great place.

The new apartment is MUCH brighter. Our deck (too dark and shady in the old place for plants) is very bright and gets sunlight much of the day, but also still has enough shade for plants that need some. My wife is finally able to do a little gardening again, something she couldn't do in the previous place.

Still, moving into a smaller place requires some sacrifices. Chief among them, I have--at this date--six small moving boxes full of books I'm going to sell to Powell's books or give away to Goodwill if Powell's doesn't take them. I'm pruning my library rather ruthlessly. It was difficult at first. I've been building my library since I was in grade school. But the fact is, I have a lot of books that I'm never going to read again, or never read in the first place. I have ebook versions* of quite a few of the newer ones, as well, so I don't need to hang onto the paperback copies.

Some of the books I've held onto for years or decades, just in case I ever wanted to read them again. In many cases (my Conan novels, first discovered and collected and read in college) I never have. Bye bye. In other cases, I've been holding onto books that I just don't read anymore. Fat traditional fantasy novels, for instance. I don't read those anymore, so they're going to someone else's library. And so forth. Some books made the cut to stay that may eventually be let go in the future. I am sure that at some point I will regret getting rid of a few of my books. But it's worth it, and if I really, really want them I expect can find them again somewhere eventually.

I'll be transporting boxes of books to Powell's to sell this week, when we're not working to empty the numerous boxes still packed from the move. Books aren't the only things we're jettisoning. We have boxes of stuff we never unpacked from the previous move as well as boxes we packed for this one. Time to winnow down our stuff some more.

Oh, and we'll simultaneously be gearing up for Snippy's next surgery in July, and for her recovery. But I'm hoping that this surgery will be the last, and that she'll recover finally after a couple of years of dealing with severe vertigo and its associated

*On my nook, and in Calibre on my desktop and saved (along with all my other documents) in a mirror image of my hard drive on a second drive as well as in the cloud. They're as secure as they can reasonably be.